The Cross Bones Garden in London is a memorial shrine on the site of an unconsecrated graveyard.
In medieval times it was a burial ground for prostitutes, known as ‘Winchester Geese’. In the 18th century it became a paupers’ graveyard.
Local people have turned the site into a memorial shrine and the garden is decorated with installations commemorating both the ‘outcast dead’ and the more recently passed away.
According to archaelogical excavations during the 1990s the Museum of London determined that over 15,000 people had been buried in what had been referred to as the graveyard for ‘single women’. They estimated that 60% of the bones were those of children.
Alasdair McLeod 